Sara Sheridan Quotes

He noticed that he felt calmer now she was here, still in that grey dress with her dowdy hat, the air around her redolent with orchid oil. Perhaps all women in England had this effect. Perhaps they all smelled of flowers and exuded a calm and measured purpose. He couldn’t remember.

~ Sara Sheridan

The world is changing and you’re only just becoming accustomed to it. You’re changing, I suppose. You’ve changed since I’ve known you.’‘How?’‘You’ve come more alive.

~ Sara Sheridan

There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.

~ Sara Sheridan

I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.

~ Sara Sheridan

There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.

~ Sara Sheridan

Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars above, the place felt like a bright secret – something ancient and precious.

~ Sara Sheridan

Maria didn’t fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.

~ Sara Sheridan

A flock of small birds took off from the wall of the fort. They moved like a length of dark silk caught by the breeze as they headed out to sea. Behind them, the sky was the colour of forget-me-nots. The sun blazed.

~ Sara Sheridan

In a heartbeat, he understands why religions are born on the sands – there is nothing here for a man but his own mind.

~ Sara Sheridan

When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.

~ Sara Sheridan

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

~ Sara Sheridan

It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one’s judgement.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.

~ Sara Sheridan

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

~ Sara Sheridan

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

~ Sara Sheridan

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

~ Sara Sheridan

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.

~ Sara Sheridan

He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadn’t shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back.

~ Sara Sheridan

Kissing her is like drinking salted water, he thinks. His thirst only increases.

~ Sara Sheridan

Such a night cannot be shaken from a woman’s memory. Such a night changes your life forever.

~ Sara Sheridan

All those kisses. There must have been a thousand. They engulfed me like some kind of all consuming dream where I became very alive and very relaxed at the same time.

~ Sara Sheridan

Sometimes you don’t even have to have sex at all, and for that kind of sicko, you charge double.

~ Sara Sheridan

She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean.

~ Sara Sheridan

It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.

~ Sara Sheridan

What was it that marked me as a woman and was I prepared to let it go?

~ Sara Sheridan

His heart is pounding and when he kisses her it is as if the whole of Riyadh disappears – the wide sky, the hard surface of the roof, the date palms and the water wells.

~ Sara Sheridan

We had laid down the law : no chocolate, no sex.

~ Sara Sheridan

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

~ Sara Sheridan

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

~ Sara Sheridan

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

~ Sara Sheridan

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

~ Sara Sheridan

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

~ Sara Sheridan

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

~ Sara Sheridan

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

~ Sara Sheridan

I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it.

~ Sara Sheridan

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

~ Sara Sheridan

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.

~ Sara Sheridan

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

~ Sara Sheridan

The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.

~ Sara Sheridan